The World Bank released the China Quarterly Update —of which I’m the lead author, full disclosure here-- today at a press launch in our Beijing office. The economic journalists noticed that the Bank’s projection for GDP growth in 2008 is now 9.8 percent, more than 2 percentage points lower than the outcome in 2007.
In 2008, growth in China, the rest of East Asia and the Pacific, and other developing regions together will fall from 7.8 percent to a still-strong 6.5 percent while their high-income trading partners like the United States slow to between 1 and 2 percent and import less.
What is good governance, and how should we measure it? What impact does governance have on growth? Even if good governance predicts positive outcomes over the long term, what effect does it have in the short term? Dani Rodrik, well-known development economist and head of Harvard’s graduate program in public administration and international development, raises as many questions as he answers in this blog post; a recent
As you may have heard, our new World Bank Chief Economist is Chinese, so it was with interest that I watched a short interview of him on Bloomberg about China's economy:
The year 2007 was an important milestone in modern economic history. While the U.S. grew well, China contributed more to global GDP growth than the U.S. did. That pattern is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Roughly speaking, the U.S. economy is about four times the size of China’s. If the U.S.
If you are interested in development economics, here is an interesting puzzle.
A few years ago, the research department at the World Bank did an analysis of what kind of information people were searching for on its website. It found that the single most searched-for word was "China," more than "poverty" or any other country or concept.
